I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Monday, April 15, 2013

Kill of the Week: Burn a spy

Number of dead super-caps last week: 4

The week started in complicated fashion with this Nyx kill. I find southern politics to be almost incomprehensible at the best of times. EVE News 24 has the story on this kill, but it's going to be a challenge for anyone but a native southern Russian to understand all the players involved. ;-) Short version: Darkside alliance was on a small gang roam when they got word of a tackled carrier. That tackled carrier, some bat-phones, and a complicated string of events later leads to a dead Nyx. From the best I can understand, it was part of an escalation that went horribly wrong...

Later that same day in Black Rise, the first titan of the week went down, this Leviathan. Cause of death? The meta game. This one was much simpler. There's a pretty good video of this one to show that the Drunk 'n' Disorderly guys that killed it had the password of the POS where the titan was and were listening in on the pilot's comms. That was a bit of a trend this week, as we'll soon see...

EDIT (15/Apr/2013): TMC has an article briefly covering both the Leviathan and Nyx above.

Next to die was this terribly fit Wyvern, also in Black Rise. I don't have any firm details on this one, so I'd appreciate it if anyone who does tell the story in comments. If the chatter on this one is to be believed, though, this Wyvern was near a station. The pilot himself had dropped out of his corp only a few minutes before the super died, and a claimed translation of what he's saying in Local as he goes down is that this isn't even his account... That points to some kind of badly-handled character transfer, plus a new player completely unaware that supers can't dock. Whoops!

And that brings me to the crown jewel of this week's super kills and also this week's KOTW, this Ragnarok. This one is covered by both EN24 and TMC, but the best most straight-forward coverage is probably on the Failheap Challenge Syndicate thread, written by one of the people allied with the titan pilot. Cause of death? Once again, the meta game. It's hard to know when to burn a spy you have in an enemy alliance. Sometimes, you burn the spy to pull off a massive corp theft. Sometimes, you burn the spy after he accumulates enough power to disband your enemy's alliance. But sometimes, you burn the spy to get a fun kill-mail and that's essentially what happened here. The spy in question warped to a cloaked titan in open space, dropped from the titan's fleet, joined a fleet of titan destroyers, landed on cloaked titan, bumped cloaked titan, lit cyno.

There's lots more detail, but it's ably covered in the various articles about this kill. I'm not the biggest fan of UsurperDOT, but they got themselves a nice kill with this one!

Honorable mention? Sometimes, you burn a spy to kill a corp-mate's particularly shiny Vindicator... That was one of two shiny Vindicators that went down this week; the latter turned a Lost Obsession tactical victory into a massive ISK war loss. I also would be remiss if I didn't throw props out to Emizeko Chai who this week landed final blow on not one, not two, but three jump freighters this week. Nice job!

A pretty busy week, all in all, though of course not as busy as I would have liked...

I find no excitement playing WoW because it feels consequenceless. I actually quite like the early iteration of Alterac Valley which felt like a tactical battle but it degenerated into a run in, spam aoe, get tons of kills and die, repeat, repeat. If you want 200 kills per hour it's effective game design. If you want any of those kills to feel like it even registers on your opponent it's not.

LOL yeah it might be entertaining if you lost all your fancy epic gear every time you died in WOW.........oh wait then you scrubs wouldn't play it......shit when u welp a raid in wow u get a buff......NE way don't compare a sandbox to your min-maxer filled theme park, some of us can figure out what to do in a game without an ! or arrow over an npcs head.

Yeah, given that he had just left his corp a couple of minutes before he died, I was almost positive this is what happened. But it struck me as so completely idiotic that I couldn't bring myself to write it.

A Darkside. was doing a business as usual roam including killing a Darkness and Despair Talos. Then a scout tackled a Carrier from Cha Ching, an HBC alliance, mostly German industrialists I believe. Cha Ching escalated with a Nyx but were still losing despite being super + carriers vs T3 battlecruisers. The Darkside. was desperate to batphone and the only person who might be able to help who might be online was the Talos pilot they'd killed.

Meanwhile the Nyx got out and warped off, then had second thoughts and went back to try again to rescue carriers. After a while a Darkness and Despair Rokh gang arrived at about the same time as a Cha Ching/Unclaimed support fleet. The HBC ship building alliance got mauled.

No Value were batphoned too but only a couple of enterprising individuals made it down there.

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